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contemporary fiction

If you’re brilliant, that is, and you know how to come up with a truly original idea.

That’s what this ad for Old Spice men’s body wash did in 2010. Titled, ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,’ it was so unexpected and so watchable, it knocked the advertising world off its feet, and breathed life back into the ageing Old Spice brand, as well as traditional TV advertising.

It also won big-time at the advertising world’s versions of the Oscars, beating out the many new kinds of media to take home the Grand Prix for film at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival 2010, a huge deal, as anyone in the business knows.

Back at the advertising agency, TBWA\HAMBURG, where I was working when the Old Spice ad swept the world, my colleagues and I would watch it over and over on YouTube, marvelling at its cheek and shaking our heads at the one-shot cleverness of its production.

We all agreed that it was a great, one-off piece of left-field genius, not the least because it was so difficult to categorise and describe. What would you say was the idea behind it, we asked ourselves. Does the execution overwhelm the idea, or is this a case of the execution being the idea itself? These discussions had us in a lather, like Old Spice body wash.

But the discussions also raised one very important question–one that had bugged me for years: what exactly is an advertising idea anyway? What’s the universally agreed definition?

In the agency business, we talked about ideas all the time. We made our living creating and selling them. Some of us had even received awards for our ideas. And, the most exulted people in the advertising world used the word ‘idea’ as if its definition was a closed case, a done deal. Listening to them, you could conclude that the definition of ‘advertising idea’ was so well understood that it was foolish to even ask the question.

And yet, if you did actually ask the question, the result would be chin scratching or blank stares.

Years later, the Old Spice ad and the discussions about ideas were still on my mind. That’s why I put those real-world debates into the fictional world of the story, ‘Big Ideas,’ the second tale in ADLANDIA.

In the story, the lead character, a young copywriter named Clive, can’t progress in his career until he nails down a definition of an advertising idea for himself. No-one in his agency can give him a satisfactory answer–neither can the Internet. They can all give examples of ideas, such as the Old Spice ad, but no-one can say what an advertising idea is supposed to be.

All of which is very bad news for Clive, whose search becomes an obsession, like the quest for the Holy Grail.

Like Clive, I made my own search, mostly with unsatisfactory results. And then, one day, an article came up in an Internet search. It was about an advertising book written decades ago. The author of the book had wrestled with this same dilemma: that everyone was always talking about advertising ideas, but the definition of them wasn’t ever discussed. But the killer thing was this: she had come up with a definition of her own, and it was perfect.

I sat back and shook my head. It was a wonderful moment, a Eureka moment, when the curtain flaps and the sun shines in.

And I still have that definition today.

To read about Clive and his search for an answer, as well as the other gripping tales of ad land, click below to get your copy of ADLANDIA.

You’re stuck and not making any progress. You try, but you don’t move forward. You’re a car with its engine revving and the handbrake on.

It’s so frustrating.

In Ad Land, I knew the feeling well. I desperately wanted to achieve the industry’s idea of success: winning a major award, but unfortunately, I never made much progress.

I came close only once, making one of the finalist categories in The One Show, a major award in the US, but I never actually mounted the stage to collect the heavy trophy to the applause of my peers, which I had daydreamed about many times.

And it burned me up.

When I wasn’t daydreaming, I was doing OK in my job as a copywriter, and, later on, as a creative director. I worked with some great people; I helped make some very nice ads; and I got to travel the world. In many ways, things were going well.

Even so, I wasn’t satisfied. If only I could win a big award, I thought, things would be much better. There would be more travel, lucrative job offers, my name in a glossy annual of winners, and I would rise to an exulted level of people who had ‘made it.’

I continued to burn inside.

But there was a simple reason I wasn’t winning these awards: I wasn’t taking enough action to win them. I had ideas that I thought could win. I worked with other people who had great ideas too. I had even talked about presenting the ideas to our clients. But I didn’t actually take the crucial next steps required. They were too much work on top of all the work I was doing already–or so I told myself.

So, nothing happened. It still burns me.

Do you know the feeling?

This sense of frustration is the subject of ‘The Laika Project,’ one of the tales from ADLANDIA. In the story, Kelvin is a talented but junior art director who daydreams of winning a major award. He’s full of ideas, many of which he thinks are pretty good, but he never actually takes the steps required to get them made into ads. So his career, like his ideas, never really get off the ground.

Then, one morning, on his way to work, Kelvin thinks of an idea that really inspires him. He calls it, The Laika Project.

The Laika Project has enormous potential. It’s a campaign to bring back the body of Laika, the dog shot into space by the Russian space agency in 1957. Kelvin believes that with The Laika Project, he at last has the campaign that will turn everything around. He’s so fired up, that, for the first time, he begins to take the difficult steps required to bring the project to life.

But will he succeed? Will he go from zero to hero? It would be nice to think so, but the only way to find out is to click below to get your copy of ADLANDIA.